Some competitors are just happy to be there but Jason was the district, and regional champion. The cramp lasts for several seconds, and he misses his first two lifts which ends up placing him 2nd at States. Did cramping keep Jason from becoming the State Champion?

Is it dehydration? An imbalance of electrolytes? Lack of stretching? As parents, are skeletal muscle cramps something out of your control or is it preventable? These are the questions that will be discussed below in preventing muscle cramps in teen athletes. Cramps often range from minor, pain-free muscle flexions to bouts of severe pain.

Cramps may just feel like painful involuntary contractions of muscle fibers but it should be noted that the brain plays a huge role in muscle activity in the human body. This is because of muscular nerves that send electrical signals to muscle fibers which allows for the thought of movement to become reality.

This is not to say, however, that we are actively thinking about cramps therefore we get them. Rather, it leads us to believe that there is some disconnect or malfunction in the electrical signaling from brain to the muscle when the onset of cramps occurs.

This electrical signaling is facilitated by the electrolytes sodium, potassium, and calcium whereas calcium and potassium play significant roles in actual muscle contraction. Muscle cramps are common among athletes. However, despite their commonality and prevalence, their cause remains somewhat unknown.

While the exact reason for every muscle cramp is not always clear, there are many widely accepted explanations to explore. One major reason cramps happen that is often overlooked is muscle fatigue. source When the body is tired, under-conditioned, undergoing an increase in training intensity or volume, or training in hot environments, muscles can fatigue more quickly than an athlete realizes.

This is important for athletes to be aware of as they begin this type of training, especially if they have a history of muscle cramping.

Other leading scientific theories as to why muscle cramps happen in athletes are related to dehydration, electrolyte balance, and neuromuscular strain. Another important consideration with sports related cramping is whether an athlete is having chronic, repeated cramping issues or a seemingly random, single experience with cramping.

Stretching, mobility work and myofascial releases by professionally trained providers can be helpful in reducing a frequent number of cramps. The million dollar question here is whether or not muscle cramps can be prevented in teen athletes.

Every cramp situation is unique, with varying cramp duration and cramp intensity, and lot of body processes going on. But there are certainly a number of nutritional recommendations that you can implement to help in preventing muscle cramps in athletes.

While dehydration is thought to be an obvious cause of cramps, it has actually been found that in healthy and athletic subjects altered electrolytes and fluid depletion do not directly relate to muscle cramps.

Even a small level of dehydration can negatively impact strain on the muscular system including the heart, alter nervous system functioning and increase core temperature. source , 5. All athletes mostly sweat and therefore experience fluid and electrolyte losses.

It is prudent to have a solid hydration plan for practices and competition that includes the right quantity of fluid and electrolytes when appropriate. Athletes who have experienced muscle cramps should absolutely pay attention to how well they are hydrating before, during and after both training sessions and competitions.

This might be why teen athletes are at risk for hydration related issues. As parents, you can help play a role in ensuring adequate hydration for your young athletes, especially when the stakes are high.

Adding flavor to water is one way to encourage drinking throughout the day. There are many ways to add flavor to water along with electrolytes for added beneficial effects. Because it seems highly likely that fatigue is also implicated in muscle cramping during exercise, finding ways to minimize this is also logical.

This is definitely a good idea if your cramps tend to occur during or after periods of heavy sweating, in hot weather, later on during longer activities, or if you generally eat a low sodium or low carb diet.

One note of caution: if you do take on additional sodium, especially in the form of electrolyte drinks, make sure they are strong enough to make a real difference. Most sports drinks are extremely light on electrolytes despite the claims they make on their labels , containing only about to mg sodium per liter 32oz.

Human sweat, on average, comes in at over mg of sodium per liter 32oz , and at Precision Hydration, we often measure athletes losing over 1,mg per liter including myself through our Advanced Sweat Test.

A good way to see where this should fit into the rest of your hydration strategy is by taking this free online Sweat Test.

Take the extra sodium in the hours immediately before and during activities that normally result in cramping and see how it affects you. When I first started taking in additional sodium before and during long, hot triathlon races, the effect was immediate and dramatic. I went from cramping up almost every time to almost never having problems again.

Other strategies that are far from proven but that either make intuitive sense or have been used by athletes in the war on cramps include:. Although none of these are likely to offer a complete solution, they are generally accessible, inexpensive and may even benefit performance in other ways, so there would seem to be little downside to giving them a try.

Hopefully, this overview of the major theories on what causes exercise-associated muscle cramps has left you feeling better equipped to fight your own war on cramps.

Bergeron, M. Heat cramps during tennis: a case report. This theory is probably the oldest. It speculates that a significant disturbance in fluid or electrolyte balance, usually due to a reduction in total body exchangeable sodium stores, causes a contraction of the interstitial fluid compartment around muscles and a misfiring of nerve impulses, leading to cramp.

This theory is more recent and proposes that muscle overload and neuromuscular fatigue are the root causes of Exercise Associated Muscle Cramp.

The hypothesis is that fatigue contributes to an imbalance between excitatory impulses from muscle spindles and inhibitory impulses from Golgi tendon organs, and that this results in a localised muscle cramp. In other words, muscles tend to cramp specifically when they are overworked and fatigued due to electrical misfiring.

One big factor that does appear to support the neuromuscular theory is that stopping and stretching affected muscles is a pretty universally effective method to fix a cramp when it is actually happening. What stretching does is put the muscle under tension invoking afferent activity from the Golgi Tendon Organs part of the muscle responsible for telling it to relax and causing the cramp to dissipate.

Again this tends to support the conclusion that fatigue is somehow causing problems for the muscle to relax so are often cited to back up this theory. Unfortunately what these studies tend to overlook is the fact that blood electrolyte levels can be quite stable in athletes in the face of vastly different levels of total sweat and sodium loss.

This is because the body tends to protect sodium concentration in the blood at the expense of blood volume when sweat losses are high, so seeing similar blood sodium concentrations in crampers and non-crampers is not necessarily indicative of anything and could even be a bit misleading in the context of the bigger picture.

Image credit: Pexels copyright free. Back in the early s cramp was more commonly viewed as a productivity issue for manual labourers doing hard physical work in hot environments, rather than not as an inconvenience to athletes.

Between the s and s there were numerous documented cases of miners , construction workers , stokers, foundry workers and military personnel all suffering muscle cramps in hot conditions. Instances were usually associated with high sweat losses and sometimes with consumption of large quantities of water at the same time.

Different groups of doctors and researchers took notes on numerous case studies around this time and some conducted rudimentary field tests. That was that providing workers with adequate sodium chloride salt along with drinking water to help them replace what was being sweated out was quite effective in treating or preventing many cases of cramps.

Fluid replacement is necessary and should include sufficient sodium chloride, otherwise the individual will suffer from fatigue, cramp, or collapse…A suitable preparation of sodium chloride in tablet form is described…After extensive trial this has proved satisfactory in the prevention of fatigue and other symptoms due to excessive heat.

It was this kind of work that inevitably shaped our early understanding of EAMC in relation to athletes. This is especially true for staunch supporters of the neuromuscular theory. In addition to the early work on industrial workers, there are a few other perspectives on electrolyte balance and cramping that are worth highlighting here too.

The first is a classic study on salt depletion that was carried out by a pioneering doctor - R. A McCance - in the s. McCance was a hands on type of researcher and was intrigued by the question of what would happen to the human body if it was depleted of salt but not fluid numerous studies into dehydration had already been undertaken by then.

He organised a study using himself and a couple of colleagues as test subjects. Essentially what McCance and his co-workers did was subject themselves to an incredibly low salt diet.

Along with their salt-free food, the subjects drank plenty of water and took hot baths to increase sweat output and accelerate salt loss.

They found that when salt depletion started to kick in it quickly led to This experience in particular - cramps disappearing soon after salt ingestion - is completely consistent with my own experiences in very long and hot triathlons when I had become salt depleted due to heavy sweating, so it definitely struck a chord with me when I first read it.

It's also congruent with lots of other anecdotal evidence coming from athletes who train or compete in similar conditions of heavy sweat loss, but more on that later.

Another notable example of electrolyte disturbance associated with cramping can be found in case reports of people suffering with hyponatremia , especially when this occurs around exercise. Hyponatremia is a condition where blood sodium levels fall lower than they should be due to dilution by over-consumption of water, excessive loss of sodium from the body, or both together as is common amongst athletes.

Cramping is often listed as a general symptom of hyponatremia in medical texts and there are case study reports in the literature such as one involving a UK serviceman who suffered cramps and collapsed whilst running in the heat in Saudi Arabia in He was successfully treated with intravenous saline salt solution and made a full recovery in the short term, but was later found out to have undiagnosed Cystic Fibrosis CF - a condition in which sufferers lose very large amounts of salt in their sweat.

It seems likely that this high rate of salt loss could have pre-disposed him to losing more salt than others doing the same exercise who did not cramp and collapse and contributed to him suffered the cramps and fatigue on more than one occasion when exercising in hot conditions.

Aside from this individual case it's well known that CF sufferers can struggle with exercise in the heat, at least in part due to their elevated levels of salt and fluid loss through very salty sweating. There are a large number of case studies, observations and anecdotal reports from athletes whose cramping problems seem to be directly related to times when fluid and sodium balance are significantly disrupted due to heavy sweating.

For example, in Dr Michael Bergeron documented a case study in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism of a tennis player who often suffered with cramps during tournaments. Having ascertained that this player had a high sweat rate and was calculated to be unlikely to be replacing his sodium losses via his normal diet, he was prescribed an increased salt intake.

The conclusion of the study was that In , a study of a year-old American Football player with a history of Cystic Fibrosis and hyponatremic seizure emphasised the importance of planning nutrition and hydration.

The player had previously struggled with severe muscle cramping issues during his previous two seasons, but he got through an entire season with minimal cramp symptoms after establishing an appropriate electrolyte replacement and hydration plan. Of the survey respondents many said that they had found that supplementing with sodium or salt during exercise had helped them manage or eliminate EAMCs.

As alluded to earlier, I also personally suffered through many long and hot triathlon races with debilitating cramps slowing me down during the run leg, or kicking in post race.

Through simple trial and error I gradually learned to consume plenty of sodium before the race and during the bike section usually in the form of salt capsules and found this to be extremely effective at not only reducing my cramping symptoms dramatically, but also helping overall performance in the latter stages of events.

Subsequently I also learned that I lose very large amounts of sodium in my sweat approaching the levels that some Cystic Fibrosis sufferers lose and that this is likely to have contributed to my issues. The bottom line is that there are a lot of examples out in the real world of people losing a lot of salt often via sweating and suffering cramps as a result and that, very often, increasing their intake of salt or sodium in other forms seems to provide relief, or even prevents cramps from happening in the first place.

Of course, the big problem with case studies, observations and anecdote is that they can fail to paint a truly complete picture of what is really going on, because they can be influenced by bias, lack control groups and can fail to account for the placebo effect.

It has also been pointed out that not all cramps can be traced back to sodium loss think about cramps that occur in cool conditions or at times when sweat losses are not significant and that not all cramps respond to increased sodium intake.

This is one big reason that the Neuromuscular Theory has been developed to try to fill in the gaps where sodium loss does not provide an adequate explanation for what is likely to be going on.

One thing that makes cramping so difficult to understand is that it remains a stubbornly fickle and unpredictable phenomenon to pin down and study properly.

A review paper argues that there's no definitive cause of cramp, but rather different causes for different types of cramp.

And this is the case for a lot of other athletes; cramps happen from time to time, but not all the time - so zeroing in on causative factors and cures can be tricky.

Image credit: Jon Candy via Creative Commons copyright free. This would explain why cramps have sometimes been shown to be relieved almost instantly when pickle juice is ingested the nerve stimulation happens almost instantly, whereas the sodium in it takes several minutes to travel to the gut and to be absorbed into the blood.

One note of caution however; if you do take on additional sodium, especially in the form of electrolyte drinks, make sure they are strong enough to make a real difference. Most sports drinks are extremely light on electrolytes despite the claims they make on their labels , containing only about mg sodium per litre 32oz.

Take the extra sodium in the hours immediately before and during activities that normally result in cramping and see how you get on there's a specific protocol laid out in this blog I wrote about how to start hydrated. When I first started taking in additional sodium before and during long, hot triathlon races the effect was immediate and dramatic.

Because it seems highly likely that fatigue is also implicated in muscle cramping during exercise, finding ways to minimize this is also logical. This is definitely a good idea if your cramps tend to occur during or after periods of heavy sweating, in hot weather, later on during longer activities, or if you generally eat a low sodium or low carb diet.

One note of caution: if you do take on additional sodium, especially in the form of electrolyte drinks, make sure they are strong enough to make a real difference. Most sports drinks are extremely light on electrolytes despite the claims they make on their labels , containing only about to mg sodium per liter 32oz.

Human sweat, on average, comes in at over mg of sodium per liter 32oz , and at Precision Hydration, we often measure athletes losing over 1,mg per liter including myself through our Advanced Sweat Test. A good way to see where this should fit into the rest of your hydration strategy is by taking this free online Sweat Test.

Take the extra sodium in the hours immediately before and during activities that normally result in cramping and see how it affects you. When I first started taking in additional sodium before and during long, hot triathlon races, the effect was immediate and dramatic.

I went from cramping up almost every time to almost never having problems again. Other strategies that are far from proven but that either make intuitive sense or have been used by athletes in the war on cramps include:. Although none of these are likely to offer a complete solution, they are generally accessible, inexpensive and may even benefit performance in other ways, so there would seem to be little downside to giving them a try.

Hopefully, this overview of the major theories on what causes exercise-associated muscle cramps has left you feeling better equipped to fight your own war on cramps.

Bergeron, M. Heat cramps during tennis: a case report. This is not to say, however, that we are actively thinking about cramps therefore we get them. Rather, it leads us to believe that there is some disconnect or malfunction in the electrical signaling from brain to the muscle when the onset of cramps occurs.

This electrical signaling is facilitated by the electrolytes sodium, potassium, and calcium whereas calcium and potassium play significant roles in actual muscle contraction. Muscle cramps are common among athletes. However, despite their commonality and prevalence, their cause remains somewhat unknown.

While the exact reason for every muscle cramp is not always clear, there are many widely accepted explanations to explore. One major reason cramps happen that is often overlooked is muscle fatigue.

source When the body is tired, under-conditioned, undergoing an increase in training intensity or volume, or training in hot environments, muscles can fatigue more quickly than an athlete realizes. This is important for athletes to be aware of as they begin this type of training, especially if they have a history of muscle cramping.

Other leading scientific theories as to why muscle cramps happen in athletes are related to dehydration, electrolyte balance, and neuromuscular strain. Another important consideration with sports related cramping is whether an athlete is having chronic, repeated cramping issues or a seemingly random, single experience with cramping.

Stretching, mobility work and myofascial releases by professionally trained providers can be helpful in reducing a frequent number of cramps.

The million dollar question here is whether or not muscle cramps can be prevented in teen athletes. Every cramp situation is unique, with varying cramp duration and cramp intensity, and lot of body processes going on.

But there are certainly a number of nutritional recommendations that you can implement to help in preventing muscle cramps in athletes. While dehydration is thought to be an obvious cause of cramps, it has actually been found that in healthy and athletic subjects altered electrolytes and fluid depletion do not directly relate to muscle cramps.

Even a small level of dehydration can negatively impact strain on the muscular system including the heart, alter nervous system functioning and increase core temperature. source , 5. All athletes mostly sweat and therefore experience fluid and electrolyte losses.

It is prudent to have a solid hydration plan for practices and competition that includes the right quantity of fluid and electrolytes when appropriate.

Athletes who have experienced muscle cramps should absolutely pay attention to how well they are hydrating before, during and after both training sessions and competitions. This might be why teen athletes are at risk for hydration related issues.

As parents, you can help play a role in ensuring adequate hydration for your young athletes, especially when the stakes are high. Adding flavor to water is one way to encourage drinking throughout the day.

There are many ways to add flavor to water along with electrolytes for added beneficial effects. Products like Nuun tablets , NOW Effer Tablets , zero calorie sports drinks are widely available and help make water more appealing. For many teens, any step that can be taken to increase voluntary fluid intake will help reduce the risk of health issues associated with dehydration, heat stress, and may even prevent cramps.

Electrolytes are a buzz word in the world of sports beverages, but what are they exactly? Electrolytes are minerals in your body that contain an electrical charge. Examples are: magnesium, potassium, chloride, sodium, calcium, and phosphate.

Low electrolyte levels are also suspected to play a role in cramp frequency. Sodium and chloride are the two electrolytes lost in greatest quantities in sweat. Sodium and chloride together make sodium chloride, otherwise known as table salt.

They play an important role in the function of nerves and muscles as well as fluid balance. The loss of sodium and chloride through sweat has been linked to many heat related problems such as cramps in athletes and can significantly hinder performance.

source A study on football players found that those with a history of muscle cramps had lower blood sodium levels during and after practices.